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1998
Report
Titel
Automated Software Engineering Data Collection Activities via the World Wide Web. A Tool Development Strategy applied in the Area of Software Inspection
Abstract
This paper contributes a strategy that provides guidance for the development of Web-based data collection tools. The collection and subsequent analysis of software engineering data is often considered a necessary prerequisite for software quality improvement approaches. In many cases, data are collected manually on paper-based forms. However, distributing and filling out paper-based forms is often cumbersome, tedious, and effort consuming. Hence, there is a need to automate data collection activities. For this, we deem the World Wide Web (WWW) the most promising infrastructure due to its growing pervasiveness. But few systematic strategies are currently available that help develop Web-based tools for software engineering data collection. This paper proposes such a development strategy. The strategy comprises (1) the mapping of predefined software engineering measures to a complete and consistent datamodel, (2) design aspects of online data collection forms and (3) the description and t he evaluation of various architectures for accessing a database via the WWW. To illustrate our proposed strategy, we use the development of a Web-based Inspection Process Support tool (WIPS) as an example. We chose the area of software inspection because the inspection process as well as the measures collected during the inspection process are well defined. This paper can be seen as a starting point for a collection of guidelines for practitioners and researchers involved in the development of Web-based data collection tools.
Verlagsort
Kaiserslautern